It seems I got the title for my book The Spectacle of Disintegration (Verso 2013) from reading Jodi Dean. I read her book Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive (Polity Press, 2010) in manuscript. On re-reading it, I find this: “disintegrating spectacles allow for ever more advanced forms of monitoring and surveillance.” (39) And “Debord’s claim that, in the society of the spectacle ‘the uses of media guarantee a kind of eternity of noisy insignificance’ applies better to communicative capitalism as a disintegrated, networked, spectacular circuit.” (112)

I think I mean something similar by spectacle of disintegration to what Dean calls communicative capitalism, even though we read Debord a bit differently, but more on that later. After revisiting Tiziana Terranova’s Network Culture in a previous blog post, Dean seemed like a logical next stop in looking back through classic works in #theory21c. I am closer to Terranova than Dean on certain points, but there are things about Dean’s work I greatly admire.

How can we even write books in the era of Snapchat and Twitter? Perhaps the book could be something like the tactic of slowing down the pace of work. Still, books are a problem for the era of communicative capitalism, which resists recombination into longer threads of argument. The contours of Dean’s argument are of a piece with this media strategy.

Dean offers “an avowedly political assessment of the present” rather than a technical one. (3) The political – a term greatly expanded in scope and connotation across a half-century of political theory – becomes the language within which to critique the seeming naturalness and inevitability of the technical. But perhaps this now calls for a kind of ‘dialectical’ compliment, a critical scrutiny of the expanded category of the political, perhaps even from the point of view of techne itself. We intellectuals do love the political, perhaps on the assumption that it is the same kind of discourse as our own.

If industrial capitalism exploited labor; communicative capitalism exploits communication. It is where “reflexivity captures creativity.” (4) Iterative loops of communication did not really lead to a realization of democratic ideals of access, inclusion, participation. On the contrary, it is an era of capture, of desire caught in a net and reduced to mere drive.

Dean draws her concepts mostly from Slavoj Zizek. Elsewhere I have arguedthat his late work at least offers little for a twenty-first century critical agenda. But if anyone has made a case for the utility of Zizek, it is Jodi Dean. So let’s approach Zizek then in an instrumental way, and see what use Dean puts him to as a tool.

For both Dean and Zizek, “Ideology is what we do, even when we know better.” (5) It s not a theory of false consciousness or even of the interpolation of the subject. In this approach to ideology, closer to Sloterdijk’s enlightened false consciousness. It is about the gap between thought and action rather than thinking the ‘wrong’ thing.

The key motif in Dean’s thought here is the decline in symbolic efficiency, also known as the collapse of the Big Other. These Lacanian phrases point to a growing impossibility of anchoring meaning or of totalizing it. Nobody is able to speak from a position that secures the sliding, proliferating chains of signification.

One could question this thesis on both historical or sociological grounds. Perhaps the stability of meaning is only ever secured by force. When I studied Vaneigem’s account of heresies in Excommunication, or Andrey Platonov’s account of popular speech under Stalinism in Molecular Red, these looked to me like the decline in symbolic efficiency already, and in both cases consistency was only secured by force.

Moving from an historical to a sociological axis, one might then look for where force is applied. In the United States that might include the red purge, the imprisonment and assassination of Black power and the now global campaign to murder the ideological enemies of the United States via death by drone. Perhaps there’s no Master’s discourse at all without force. The same would apply on a more day to day scale with domestic violence and police murder.

There might certainly be particular instances of the decline in symbolic efficiency, when the function of the Master signifier is suspended, when there is no outside authority to tell us what to do, what to desire, what to believe, and where the result isn’t freedom but rather a kind of suffocation. Dean gives the example of Second Life, where people are free to have their avatars do anything, and that ends up being building real estate, shopping and weird sex stuff. Tumblr might be another example, where being free from the Master signifier seems to mean putting together random collages of pictures and greeting card quotations.

The Master signifier depends on virtuality. It is not just another sign in a chain of signs, but a potential for signification as such, a way to project across the gap between fantasy and the real. Interestingly, where for Paolo Virno the virtual ends up sustaining history as a theological premise, here the virtual is theology as historical premise, as that which declines, taking the possibility of desire with it from the world.

Without the Master signifier, there’s no reason to stay with anything. Bonds can be dissolved at no cost. There’s a dissolution of the link between fantasy and reality, and a foreclosure of the symbolic. It is the gaps in the symbolic that allow access to the real, but those gaps are foreclosed, resulting in non-desire, non-meaning, and in the saturation in enjoyment. We are caught in short, recursive loops that attempt to directly provide enjoyment, but which just repeat over and over again its impossibility.

This kind of recursive or reflexive loop in which the subject is trapped applies to the world of objects too in communicative capitalism. Dean mentions climate change, but the Anthropocene more generally, or what Marx called metabolic rift might be symptoms of such loops in operation, in which positive feedback dominates, with the result that more is more. The capture of both objects and subjects just keeps deepening and expanding. Dean: “More circuits, more loops, more spoils for the first, strongest, richest, fastest, biggest.” (13)

How the hell did it come to this? Dean builds on the work of our mutual friend Fred Turner, whose From Counterculture to Cyberculture tracks the construction of what Richard Barbrook calls the California Ideology. How did computing and information science, which were tools of control and hierarchy, become tools of collaboration and flexibility?

Here I read Fred’s book a little differently to Dean. What I see there is a kind of social and technical field that was always open to different kinds of research and different kinds of result. The wartime laboratory experience in science and engineering was strikingly collaborative, expanding and developing what JD Bernal thought of as the communist practice of real science, and what forRichard Stallman (a red diaper baby) was the commons of hacker practice.

Of course, what the military wanted from such experimental practices was a toolkit for command, control, communication and information, (aka C3I). But even there, flexibility and openness was always one of the objectives. The Air Force’s missile program might have imagined what Paul Edwards calls a closed world of cybernetic control, but the Army wanted tools that could work in the fog and friction of war as flexible, open, adaptive networks. The technology that descended from such academic and military origins was always hybrid and multiform, adaptable in different ways to different kinds of economies, politics and culture, although certainly not infinitely so.

What I find missing in Dean is the sense of a struggle over how tech and flesh were to co-adapt to each other. Let’s not forget the damage done to the conversation about the politics of technology by the cold war purge, in which not only artists and writers were blacklisted, but scientists and engineers as well.

Iris Chang’s account of the fate of Tsien Hsue-Shen in Thread of the Silkworm is only the most absurdist of such stories. This pioneer rocket scientist lost his security clearances for having social ties to people who unbeknownst to him were communists. And so he was deported – to communist China! There be actually became what he never was in America – a highly skilled scientist working for the ‘communist cause’. This is just the most crazy of many thousands of such stories. Those who find the tech world ‘apolitical’ might inquire as to how it was made so thoroughly so.

Hence the California ideology is a product of particular histories, one piece of which is documented so well in Turner – but there are histories. The belief that tech will save the world, that institutions are to be tolerated but not engaged, that rough consensus and running code are all that matter – this is not the only ideology of the tech world. That it became an unusually predominant one is not some naturally occurring phenomena – even though both California ideologies and Dean both tend to think it is. Rather, it is the product of particular struggles in which such an ideology got a powerful assist, firstly from state repression of certain alternatives, and then by corporate patronage of the more business-friendly versions of it.

Dean write about “geeks” (23, 25) as if they were some kind of freemasonry, pretending to be apolitical, but with quiet influence. One might usefully look here to a deeper history of the kind of power the sciences and engineers have had, one not quite covered even by the ever-expanding sense of the ‘political’ now employed. The counter-literature here might include what for me is Bruno Latour’s best work: his historical study of Pasteur, and of the kind of spatially and temporally concentrating power of the laboratory.

As Latour shows, Pasteur’s actual political-politics were fairly conventional and not very interesting, but the way the lab was able to become a form of power is a quite different story. Can we – why not? – even think of this as a class power, which has accrued over time its own field of heterogeneous interests, and which stands in relation to the commodity form as neither capital nor labor even if – like all other classes – it is forced into one or other of those relations.

For Dean the geek, or in my terms the hacker class, is a displaced mediator, something that is pushed aside. But by what? The formal category of mediator covers over the existence of a kind of struggle that is neither purely political or a ‘natural’ result of tech evolution. We still lack a sense of the struggles over the information vector of the late twentieth century, with their partial victories and eventual defeats.

The book is called Blog Theory, and in some ways its strength is its relation – only occasionally signaled – to Dean’s own practice as a blogger. There was a time when I read Dean’s (I Cite) blog religiously, alongside Nina Power, Mark Fisher (k-punk), Lars Iyer (Spurious) and a handful of others who really pioneered a kind of theory-writing in blog form, along side the new kinds of more (post)literary practices of Kate Zambreno and friends.

Blogging also looks like a displaced mediator, a step on the way to the mega-socialized media forms such as Facehooker, as Dean already senses. Dean: “Blogging’s settings… include the decline of symbolic efficiency, the recursive loops of universalized reflexivity, the extreme inequalities that reflexive networks produce, and the operation of displaced mediators at points of critical transition.” (29) Tumblr already existed in 2010 when Dean wrote Blog Theory, but was not quite as perfect an illustration of Dean’s conceptual framework then as it is now. Another name for all this might be the tumblresque.

Such media forms become short loops that lock the subject into repeated attempts at enjoyment, where enjoyment is no longer the lost object of desire but the object of loss itself. All drive is death drive. These reflexive, iterative loops are where we are stuck. Communicative action is not enlightenment. “… what idealists from the Enlightenment through critical and democratic theory, to contemporary techno-utopians theorize as the very form of freedom is actually a mechanism for the generation of extreme inequality and capture.” (30)

This is not even, as in Hiroki Azuma, a return to a kind of human-animal. “The notion of drive counters this immanent naturalism by highlighting the inhuman at the heart of the human…” (31) The all-too-human ability to stick on minor differences and futile distractions drives the human ever further away from its own impossibility.

Communicative capitalism relies on repetition, on suspending narrative, identity, and norms. Framed in those terms, the problem then is to create the possibility of breaking out of the endless short loops of drive. But if anything the tendency is in the other direction. After blogging came Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat, driving even further into repetition. The culture industries gave way to what I call the vulture industries.

Dean identified the tendency already with blogs. They no longer fill a desire for a way to communicate. Desire is a desire for a desire – that absent thing – whereas a drive is a repetition not of the desire but of the moment of failure to reach it. The virtual dimension disappears.

Blogs had their counterpoint in search engines, as that which knows our desires even when we don’t. With the search engine, one trusts the algorithm; with blogs, one trusts one’s friends. Two kinds of affective response dominate in relation to both. One is hysterical: that’s not it! There must be more! The other is paranoid: someone must be stealing all the data. As it turned out, the former drove people to search and search, blog and blog, all the better for actual agencies – both state and corporate – to indeed steal it all. Here I would stress the asymmetry and struggle over information as a crucial feature of communicative capitalism – which may no longer even be a capitalism, but something worse.

The blog for Dean is not a journal or journalism nor a literary form. It may be something like the letter writing of a pre-modern era, which was meant to be circulated beyond the named addressee. It is a sort of technique of the self, one that installs a gaze that shapes the writer. But there’s an ambiguity as to who the writer is visible to. For Dean, this gaze is not that of the Big Other, but of that other creature of Lacan-speak, the objet petit a. In this version, there is an asymmetry: we are entrapped in a kind of visibility. I see from my point of view but am seen from all points of view. It is as if I am seen by an alien object rather than another person. I receive no messages back specific to me and my identity. Ego formation is blocked.

Dean: “Blogging is a technology uncoupled from the illusion of a core, true, essential and singular self…. In communicative capitalism, the gaze to which one makes oneself visible is a point hidden in an opaque and heterogeneous network. It is not the gaze of the symbolic other of our ego ideal but the more disturbing traumatic gaze of a gap or excess, objet petit a.” (56) Hence I never quite know who I am, even though I take endless online quizzes to try to find out. Which punk rock goddess are you? It turns out I am Kim Gordon. Funny, I thought I was Patti Smith.

The decline in symbolic efficiency is a convergence of the imaginary and the real. It is a world of imaginary identities sustained by the promise of enjoyment rather than a world of symbolic identities residing in the gap where desire desires to desire. Unanchored from the symbolic, and its impossible relation to the Big Other, I become too labile and unstable. It is a world of selves with boundary issues, over-sharing, but also troubled by any signs of the success of others, tripping circuits of envy and schadenfreude. It is not a world of law and transgression but repetition and drive. No more lost object of desire, its all loss itself as object. Blocked desires proliferate as partial drives making quickie loops, disappearing into the nets.

Of courses there are those who would celebrate this kind of (post)subjectivity. It could have been a step towards Guattari’s planet of six billion perverts, all coupling and breaking in desiring machines of wildly proliferating sorts. Dean explores instead the way the decline in symbolic efficiency was framed by Agamben as whatever being. Dean: “whatever being points to new modes of community and new forms of personality anticipated by the dissolution of inscriptions of identity through citizenship, ethnicity, and other modern markers of belonging.” (66) For Agamben, some of this is a good thing, in the dissolution of national identities, for example. His strategy – reminiscent of Baudrillard’s fatal strategy is to push whatever being to its limits.

As every blogger knows, this media is not about reading and interpreting, but about circulating the signs. TL;DR, or “too long, didn’t read,” is the most common response. For Dean, the “whatever” in whatever being is a kind of insolence, a minimal acknowledgement that communication has taken place with no attempt to understand it.

Agamben thinks there might be a way to take back the positive properties of being in language that communicative capitalism expropriates. He looks forward to a planetary refusal of identity, a kind of singularity without identity, perhaps other ways of belonging. Dean: “the beings who would so belong are not subjects in the sense that European philosophy or psychoanalysis might theorize.” (82) To which us card-carrying Deleuzians might respond: so much the worse for psychoanalysis and philosophy!

Dean is disturbed by the apparent lack of antagonism of whatever being. But is it apolitical, or just a phenomena in which differences work out differently, without dialectic? Dean: “I can locate here neither a politics I admire nor any sort of struggle at all. What could motivate whatever beings?” (83) They don’t lack anything. But maybe that’s the point. Of course, whatever being does not evade the state in the way Agamben might have hoped. The capture of metadata enables a recording that does not presuppose classification or identity. The back hole of the masses has been conquered by the algorithm. Their silence speaks volumes.

Agamben thought the extreme alienation of language in spectacle could have an kind of ironic coda, where that very alienation becomes something positive, a being after identity. He actually has a positive way of thinking what for Zizek and Dean is drive. Are whatever being really passive, or just a bit slippery? Why is passivity a bad thing anyway? Maybe there was always something a bit backward looking about Lacan.

In The Freudian Robot, Lydia Liu reads Lacan as reacting against the information science of the postwar years. As Tiziana Terranova shows, this was a period in which questions of texts and meanings were side-stepped by new ways of analyzing information mathematically, as a field of statistical probability. Here I am closer to Terranova in thinking that it is time to rethink strategy on the terrain on information rather than that of meaning. Dean does not: “What’s lost? The ability to distinguish between contestatory and hegemonic speech. Irony. Tonality. Normativity.” (89)

But were these ever more than illusions intellectuals entertained about what was going on in communication? Here I find reading Platonov salutary, as his accounts of the language of early Soviet times is really more one of frequency and repetition rather than a politics of ideology or propaganda. I don’t think the road to strategy necessarily always passes through critique, or through a politics of the subject as formed in the symbolic register. Perhaps the flux between the imaginary and the real is where the human resides most of the time anyway. It is not as if the symbolic has reliably been our friend.

Dean mentions Friedrich Kittler’s cunning reworking of Lacan back into media theory, but I would pause to give it a bit more weight. For Kittler, Lacan’s famous tripartite of imaginary, symbolic and real is actually an effect of a certain moment in the development of media. It was a stage in the evolution ofHaraway’s cyborg, when different technics became the mediating apparatus for different flows of sensation. For Kittler, the imaginary is the screen, the symbolic is the typewriter, and the gramophone is the real. This explains so much of the anxiety of the literate classes: the struggle of the typewriters against the screen, insisting on this or that symbolic order against the self/other fluctuations of screen-generated media, and with the grain of the voice as residual stand-in for the real beyond both. All of which, of course, media ‘convergence’ erases. We’re differently wired cyborgs now.

It is telling that Dean wants to resist the “snares” of cognitive capitalism. (95) Dean: “Every little tweet or comment, every forwarded image or petition, accrues a tiny affective nugget, a little surplus enjoyment, a smidgen of attention that attaches to it, making it stand out from the larger flow before it blends back in.” (95) It is hard not to read it in media terms as an appeal by those invested in one media cyborg apparatus to resist the one that’s replacing it. Of course the new one is part of a political economy of domination and exploitation – but so too was the old mass media apparatus.

Of course there’s things one can tease out of a conceptual frame that puts the emphasis on the subject’s relation to the symbolic order. But I don’t see this as a truly essential theoretical tactic. In many ways I think it more productive to follow Terranova and think about information as a ratio of signal to noise, and beyond that as a kind of dynamics into which one might attempt to intervene with information tactics. This is what the situationists called détournement.

I would want to bring the concept of détournement more fully into relation to the work of both writers, as I think it is a more nuanced way of thinking the montage practices of Terranova’s network culture. For Dean, “The politics that montage suggests is a politics released from the burdens of coherence and consistency.” (104)

But isn’t information politics always about frequency, about the probability of certain information appearing with certain other information, about affective states thereby generated. It is only intellectuals who really think political communication is anything else. Even economics may be not much more than this. In the vectoral age, as Boutang suggests, nobody knows the actual value of anything, so the problem is outsourced to a vast cyborg of plug and play info-filters – some human, some algorithmic.

Such an information ecology has its problems, of course. It knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. As Debord was already suggesting, the integrated spectacle integrated itself into the reality it was describing, and then ceased to know the difference between the two. We now live in the metabolic rifts produced by the wildly improbably molecular flows this produced, which in turn generates the disintegrating spectacle some call the Anthropocene.

What both Agamben and Dean miss about Debord is that the concept of spectacle was always doubled by that of détournement. This is clear in The Society of the Spectacle, where détournement gets the key last chapter (before the concluding coda). There Debord restates the case for the literary communism he and Gil Wolman first proposed in the 1950s as the avant-garde strategy for the era of spectacle. Détournement is precisely the tactic of treating all information as the commons, and refusing all private property in this domain.

Contra Dean, this has nothing to do with a ‘participatory’ politics at all. It was always about the overthrown of the spectacle as a totality. Nor was Debord really contributing to the undermining of ‘expertise’. On the contrary, he dedicated his Comments to those few on both sides who he thought really had the knowledge to either defend the spectacle – or attack it. The same is the case with the book he helped Sanguinetti write about the Italian spectacle of the 70s – The Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy. He was well aware of the dangers of recuperation back into spectacle. It was indeed one of his major themes. Dean: “The spectacle contains and captures the possibility of the common good.” (112) But this is already the central point of his late work, which is about withdrawal rather than participation.

Of course, détournement itself became coopted. Free information became the basis of a new business model, one that extracts surplus information from free labor. But this means moving détournement on from free data to freeing metadata. This may require not just détournement and critique but actually building different kinds of circuit, even if it is just in the gaps of the current infrastructure.

For the time being, one tactic is just to keep putting into circulation the conjunctions of information that generate the affect of solidarity and the commons. It’s a way of taking advantage of the lateral ‘search’ that the decline of symbolic efficiency, or at least the lack of coercive force maintaining it, affords. There is surely a place for what Dean calls “discipline, sacrifice and delay.” (125) But Rome wasn’t unbuilt in a day, and it may take more than one kind of subject-apparatus cyborg to make a new civilization. The party presupposes a milieu. It is an effect and not a cause. Let’s build a new milieu.

This civilization is over and everyone knows it. One need look no further thanAndrew Ross’ account of environmental justice in Phoenix, Arizona to see the scale on which we have to imagine building another one. That is an organizational problem that calls for all sorts of different solutions to all sorts of problems. There can be no one ‘correct’ critical theory. They are all just tools for addressing parts of a manifold problem. Dean’s work seems well suited to the diagnosis of a certain subjective short-circuit and one possible solution to it.

Strangely enough both Dean and Terranova have a use for the concept of the virtual, but here I would follow Debord and think more in terms of constrained situations and available resources. Both the Lacanians and the Deleuzians, otherwise so opposed, may both be a little too theological for the times.

February 07, 2015

Since the end of October (and my first arrest on November 3), I've been involved in civil disobedience actions at the gates of Texas-based oil and gas company Crestwood-Midstream to stop the company from storing methane gas in the fragile salt caverns of Seneca Lake. The facility is at the south end of the lake; I live at the north end. The lake supplies the drinking water for about a hundred thousand people. Seneca Lake is fragile, higher in salinity than the other Finger Lakes, likely because of LPG storage in the sixties through the eighties. I've been on the line six times, arrested four of those times, and in a support role three additional times.

The issue is complicated and layered, not one I would have chosen. It chose me.

I wonder if politics works this way a lot of the time. I wonder if there is or will be something about climate politics that makes the way it will choose us to engage different from other political matters. What makes this seem likely is the largeness and seeming intractability of the problem: it is already happening. Binding global agreements seem unlikely and already like too little too late. We get trapped into the worst sorts of individualizing approaches that reduce action to one's consumer choices or ethical stance, feeling responsible.

The expanded storage facility would be part of the fracking infrastructure. Allowing it to be built undermines efforts to ban fracking (or maintain the ban in NY), adding to the ability of the industry to say things like "well, X is already in place." Methane in particular has an even greater warming effect than carbon. So this isn't a NIMBY issue. The point is no fracking here, no fracking anywhere.

We have to insist on no fracking anywhere as a necessary component of climate politics: fossil fuels must stay in the ground (which would be helped by not calling them "fuel" anymore or even "fossils" since "fossils" seem to be things that are out of the ground and within human containers, generally, museums).

One divides into two -- in this case, the struggle over protecting one lake divides into that plus another struggle against fracking. The struggle against fracking divides into itself plus the struggle to mitigate rather than compound climate change. And this struggle, to be the struggle it is, is a struggle against capitalism. If there is to be any mitigation of global climate change, a massive sector of the capitalist economy -- the oil and gas industry, which includes, then, petro-chemicals, shipping and transport, the financial markets associated with speculating on oil and gas as commodities as well as other stocks and investments, automobiles, roads, the component industries of all of these -- has to be shut down. This means lots of job loss: in a sense the dismantling of the carbon-combustion complex is akin to the de-industrialization of the seventies and eighties. Instead of jobs and processes being moved elsewhere, though, they would be eliminated. Yes, renewables, thought broadly in ways that connect with renewing the capacities and resources of workers who have had to make their livings in the industry threatening us all.

The array of pipeline, storage, and water struggles are salvos against the oil and gas sector of the capitalist economy, attacks on its base, the energy system that supports it. It makes me wonder about the fruitfulness of an analogy with the early days of organized working class struggle as Marx and Engels describe in the Communist Manifesto, the days when workers are beginning to form combinations (Trades' Unions) against the bourgeoisie. Marx and Engels write: "The real fruit of their battle lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of the workers."

In addition to learning a lot about propane, butane, and methane, the economics of the oil and gas industry, the dangers associated with the storage and transport of methane and LPGs, I've learned more about engaged collective action, maybe even the way in which an "ever-expanding union" may produce itself in practices of comradeship where one finds oneself acting in solidarity with a whole slew of people one barely knows and may not have much in common with outside the action (which itself grows to become the focus of life rather than what is added in when one 'has time' -- really, none of us have time, individually or collectively).

I say 'engaged collective action' because I am reluctant to say "activism," feeling uneasy about the term (although, interestingly, the local paper, covering a rally I helped organize last weekend, called the over 300 people who came out in 17 degree weather to march in Geneva, many for the first time, 'activists'). I am also reluctant to say "grassroots," in part because it starts to suggest to me a chain of associations that leads to unrooted cosmopolitan intellectuals, an environment that I also inhabit, but again not in those terms.

Since I am in this vein of saying what I am not saying, I'll add that I don't think of the actions of the group We Are Seneca Lake via the binary of 'local' versus 'global,' a binary into which some of my friends and comrades want to assimilate it. Problems with the local/global binary include the rendering of sacrifice zones into localities while the global persists as a realm of functioning success, the production of some eyes, opinions, and attention at what needs to be "gotten" for something to matter (and here plays into the worse tendencies of communicative capitalism), and the utter failure to take seriously the material interconnections of infrastructure, capitalism, state, and climate that intellectuals in particular have claimed to be focusing on for over a decade.

A few lessons:

1. Footwear matters.

2. Wear sunscreen.

3. Wear layers.

4. There are divisions of labor that make people happy: people like making contributions that matter, such as providing care and sustenance by bringing food, providing technical, legal, and creative services, providing good humor, energy, calm, information. Many of us like being foot-soldiers, banner holders, reliable cadre. "Just tell me where to go and I will be there. You can count on me." Being one of many -- of the 40 arrested on the big day, of the 15 who stood in the cold and wind the whole fucking day, of the 12 from the first arrests, of the 6 who went to jail -- gives us a sense of purpose that we can't give ourselves by ourselves: "how do I help?"

5. Leadership gives people the confidence to do more than they thought they could. Organizers channel and reinforce this confidence, letting it intensify and spread.

6. It makes sense to look for allies. (Honestly, this is where the insane politics of outrage of the typing left leaves me cold, much colder than 12 degrees and wind on the west side of Seneca Lake. In the name of a rejection of norms, the politics of outrage incites the expression of rhetorical alliance within media networks, reinforcing the primacy of these networks and these expressions. That this is in the name of the rejection of norms makes sense: in replace of these norms is a super-ego injunction that we can never satisfy and that gets stronger with every attempt to satisfy it.)

7. Comradeship is a general sensibility cultivated out of commitment to a common end. Arising out repeated practices, comradeship traverses and transcends specific motives for engagement.

August 14, 2014

It's become striking to me over the last few weeks how people seemingly committed to social change in fact hold on to privilege and inequality -- even if it is not their own.

This is not a new insight. Activists struggle over this question all the time. I've just come across it first hand in ways that I didn't expect. It seems like some people just like to protest. When the opportunity arises to do something with the capacity that protesting enabled, they fold, providing all sorts of excuses as to why the basic order should be maintained.

I didn't expect people committed to gender equality to defend the continuation of structures premised on inequality. Somehow I didn't expect that they, too, would enjoy hierarchical power. Maybe I can be clearer on this: I am not talking about people at the top of the food chain holding on to power. I am talking about people with relatively little power wanting to maintain the status quo that they in fact critique. It's as if they enjoy what power does to others; they enjoy seeing some people hurt or injured or shamed.

What I'm trying to describe (albeit necessarily vaguely) is not Nietzschean ressentiment. It's more like enjoying through the other. So, for example, people say they are against the exclusionary practices of group X, but when it comes down to changing the structures that let these practices persist, they balk. There are things that they admire about group X. They enjoy what the wealth and status of group X can accomplish, even when, especially when, it becomes violent and transgressive. Maybe a way to say this: class privilege sometimes persists because those who say they are against it are actually invested in it and enjoy inequality.

And the vehemence of the rhetoric and the anger that arises amidst the confusion is in part anxiety over the confrontation with enjoyment. They don't want to be people that, say, secretly tolerate an undercurrent of sexual violence--Zizek's obscene supplement or nightly law. This has to be repressed. Anger at authority is not anger over authority's failure to prevent violence. It's over authority's failure to prevent violence's exposure.

I think I have new appreciation for the power of the nightly law and how hard it is to address, how it can derail reformist as well as revolutionary energies. This may also go some way in accounting for the prevalence of 'awareness' as a left and liberal goal. By making us more aware of a variety of things, the left liberal leaves the obscene supplement in place. We get preoccupied with information and media campaigns instead of changing institutions and policies. It's one thing to be aware of inequality. Eliminating it is another thing altogether.

February 09, 2014

We invite the world psychoanalytic community to join us in opposing the brutal beating and persecution of people, who took to the streets of Bosnia and Herzegovina to exercise their right to speak against poverty and injustice.

The authorities, who have profited from the trauma of war and genocide for over 20 years, keep on manipulating this trauma for their divisive political purposes. They systematically repress and deny any expression of the demands of citizens for freedom of speech.

We are aware that repressive and violent action by the authorities against people, who have not yet had space to speak about the trauma of war and genocide, may result in further physical and mental injuries.

We invite the world psychoanalytic community to support publicly our calls to end violence against people who are exercising their basic right to speak. We also invite all psychoanalysts to work with us on the prolonged trauma of and in a society where psychoanalysis is in its early days.

December 31, 2013

A few weeks ago when Paul and I were in NYC for the baptism of the child of some friends (by Reverend Billy), we ran into some acquaintances. The acquaintances are men in their late twenties. We ran into them around NYU. I made strained small-talk with one while Paul chatted with the other.

The guy I was talking to is a hedge fund manager.

I didn't push it. Really. After covering sports, the weather, the few people we know in common, he asks about my kids. I reply that my son is going to McGill. He's impressed and adds, "a lot of guys in my firm went to McGill." I smile sweetly, "The one thing I hope my son will never, ever, become is a hedge fund manager."

The guy laughs uneasily, "Well, he should be able to make his own choices."

"But not that."

"What's so wrong with being a hedge fund manager?"

I look at him like he must either have severe brain damage or be from another planet (both, I think, are true, the effects of capitalist excess). "Umm, the role of the finance sector in the intensification of economic inequality in the US and the larger global economic crisis?"

He says, "Well, that's your opinion."

"No. It's a fact."

"Well, some would disagree."

"Then they are wrong."

He stares at me. I offer, "My most recent book is The Communist Horizon." He grabs the other guy and insists that they have to go. Now.

The next evening while a blizzard engulfed the city I sat in a bar with a socialist friend a few years younger than the other guys. After I recounted the conversation from the night before, he tells me a similar story. A few weeks earlier, he was chatting with a woman at a party. He said something critical of Wall Street and she became uneasy, volunteering that she worked in finance, that people who go into debt have no one but themselves to blame, that anyone who works hard can easily save enough money to have a good life, etc. He described some of the challenges faced by his working class parents, tying them to the structural role of debt and unemployment for capitalism. She became increasingly uncomfortable, defensive, and angry, ultimately storming off.

The bright side of these stories of twenty-something shame: the fact that they feel it. They aren't bragging and gloating. This isn't Jamie Dimon and his gloating Christmas card. Rather, these twenty-somethings quickly cave under the realization of the wrong of inequality. They might try, initially, to parrot the capitalist ideological clap-trap that protects them, but they feel its holes. They don't believe it anymore, even if they want to. Jamie Dimon and his ilk do their best to patch up the the image of extreme wealth, "look how fun it is!," but their deafness to the tone of the times betrays their underlying desperation. Misfires are symptoms of their crumbling position. They won't be able to hold it much longer.

I lived in NYC in the mid-eighties. I worked for a year in a low-paid publishing job and then went to graduate school. A few friends and a lot of acquaintances had gone to work on Wall Street (Karen's Ho's Liquidated is a great ethnography on this pipeline). They were investment bankers and traders. Some dealt in junk bonds. From the outside, it looked like a wild scene, not as extreme as "The Wolf of Wall Street" but not so far off, either.

The difference is that in the mid-eighties, these guys were shameless, masters of the universe, Tom Wolfe would call them in Bonfire of the Vanities. The Gordon Gekko line, "greed is good," wasn't a critique, it was a flag, a banner.

This flag is now in tatters. The banner has fallen.

Now even those who want to be Wall Street's gekkos and wolves can't. They don't believe anymore that the rest of us believe that they are winners, that they are the smartest guys in the room, that they somehow deserve or have earned their immensely unequal share of the common surplus. They know that the rest of us think that are thieves, extortionists, criminals. A little shame has crept in. That's why the twenty-somethings got angry.

"The Wolf of Wall Street" lays bear the injunction to enjoy underlying the last thirty years of financialization. The ambiguity of the movie comes from our relation to this enjoyment. Does it incite our desire, does it arouse us, making us against our better selves in fact want to be like them, want to have what they have? Does it disgust us, arousing our indignation? Does it blend the two together so that we find ourselves with no place to stand (sex and drugs are fun! I'm no conservative, moralistic, prude!)? And, if it does any of these does the movie end up coming too much to the assistance of Jamie Dimon and his ilk? Maybe the audience for the film is those twenty-something finance types who want to rid themselves of the shame that shadows their work in the sector that is killing the world.

Criticisms of the movie for its sexism miss the mark. The movie enacts obscenity. It enjoins excess and this injunction always is at a cost to someone. Someone is exploited (or excluded--it's a white movie--or beaten up--lots of homophobia). The excess has to be understood as inseparable from Wall Street. Nothing to be proud of here. They should all be ashamed.

February 15, 2013

I've been perplexed lately, wondering about the strange link between the individual and the subject. I use a couple of slogans to designate the problem. One is an inversion of Althusser: the subject is interpellated as an individual. The other comes from reading Federici (although she doesn't put it exactly this way): the individual is a form of enclosure.

It's clear enough that psychoanalysis is the study of failure, the specific failure of the individual form. The object of its discourse is nothing but this failure. Hence, the scandal of Lacan is to place nothing at all at the heart of the subject, to recognize that 'subject' names nothing but a gap or lack. Every component of the psychic apparatus, evey arrangement of the economies of desire and drive, every discourse that constitutes a social link works around, over, and through this emptiness, investing it with a charge or intensity such that it always seems more than itself.

And, why not, Marx and Nietzsche also give rise to the two other primary studies of failure inextricable from the waning of European modernity: the failure of capitalism and the failure of morality (Corey Robin is pursuing an exciting project that makes the operative term here "value," as he notes the convergence between the ungrounding of value in Hayek and in Nietzsche). In this vein, what becomes postmodernity or late-modernity is resignation, complacency, acquiescence, compromise, and melancholia. No grand narratives, no utopia, no ideals. Even that political form said to be the best, democracy, is acknowledged as unworkable, not so good, only viable because everything else is worse. Political maturity, political realism, is accepting this sorry state with good humor and irony.

The happy story left behind was one of modernity as a kind of triumph, the liberation of reason from dogma, of the individual from the collective, of creativity from stultification and determination within a realm of traditional culture that confined individuals within pregiven roles. And even as our discourses of failure have taught us, rightly, to critique and reject the happy story, how is it that its terms and suppositions persist? More specifically, how is it that some kind of individual free from the collective is so frequently turned to and invoked, the limit of any political project as if struggle were only and ever liberal?

How is it that the subject remains reduced to the individual, as if there were an individual who is subjected rather than a collective, exercising the power of its own self-determination, that becomes fragmented and desubjectified, pacified as it is divided up into ever smaller portions?

If we can think of such a prior collective subject, and Freud's discussion of the unconscious as a crowd suggests that we can, then the gap Lacan notes suggests the form that remains once it is emptied of the crowd, once everyone leaves, like an arena that one can never fill alone. Perhaps a better metaphor would be a field where the grass is left broken and flat after everyone is gone. Or perhaps an empty street or public square, the strewn paper and broken glass traces of the many who had been. Subject is gap in the structure not in the sense that subject designates a site of individual freedom, decision, or choice, and not in the sense of unconscious fantasies that fill in and direct the never complete structure, and not even in the sense of the twist or torsion of the real, but rather in the sense that structure becomes subject as collective. The collective body is the subject form of the structure, the gap that makes it not fully itself, or the gap between the ways it is active and the way it is passive.

How is it that subject and individual seem blurred and even equated in contemporary thought? I wonder if we might blame critiques of the transcendental subject that tried to give it a body in order to critique this body for its exclusions? I wonder as well about the effects of forty years of neoliberalism where the emphasis on the unique and creative individual is so incessant, so unavoidable, that we fall into it, unaware. And then I wonder, well, maybe it's just me, maybe it's just my mistake, my misunderstanding. Does this actually enact the very problem I'm trying to address? I personalize and individualize it, eliminating what is common before it can appear?

The Psychic Life of Power opens clearly enough: the paradox of subjection Butler investigates via Freud, Foucault, and Althusser is a formal problem, the problem of the subject form. She writes:

"The subject" is sometimes bandied about as if it were interchangeable with "the person" or "the individual." The geneaology of the subject as a critical category, however, suggests that the subject, rather than be identified strictly with the individual, ought to be designated as a linguistic category, a placeholder, a structure in formation. Individuals come to occupy the site of the subject (the subject simultaneously emerges as a 'site'), and to enjoy intelligibility only to the extent that they are, as it were, first established in language. The subject is the linguistic occasion for the individual to achieve and reproduce intelligibility, the linguistic condition of its existence and agency. No individual becomes a subject without first becoming subjected or undergoing subjectivation . . . It makes little sense to treat 'the individual' as an intelligible term if individuals are said to acquire their intelligibility by becoming subjects. Paradoxically, no intelligible reference to individuals or their becoming can take place without a prior reference to their status as subjects. The story by which subjection is told is, inevitably, circular, presupposing the very subject for which it seeks to give an account. On the one hand, the subject can refer to its own genesis only by taking a third-person perspective on itself, that is by dispossessing its own perspective in the act of narrating its genesis. On the other hand, the narration of how the subject is constituted presupposes that the constitution has already taken place, and thus arrives after the fact. 10-11

Can more than one individual occupy the place of the subject at the same time? If the function of the category subject is to hold a place, then it would seem absolutely necessary that more than one individual occupies the place. Individual is a specific occupation of the subject. And, that would mean that as a subject, the individual can't be individuated. It's just an occupant among other occupants. Subject designates what they are in common, their commonality. For Butler this occupation is subjection, a kind of repression and discipline that involves a relation to law, an attachment to law. As the individual is subjectified, it sacrificies something of itself. To be a subject is to be, in a way, bereft.

But in what way? It seems at times that Butler thinks that the subject is bereft of freedom, where freedom is a kind of authenticity, a freedom to love and desire as she chooses or as she could choose were she not beholden to a norm to which she is subjected. But I wonder if we might understand this differently. When the individual occupies the place of the subject, the individual is bereft of others, of the crowd, of the collective. The individual tries to do and be alone what she can only do and be with others. The place of the subject is a place for us, not for me. It's a crowded place.

It sometimes seems to me as if Butler presumes a link between individual and subject, as if individual preexisted subject and were separate from it, even if its separate pre-existence is inchoate, even abject. When she refers to subject as the condition for the individual's agency, it seems to me that she says this sadly or critically. For her, it's a problem that the individual has to be subjected to have agency.

But if subject is collective, then we recognize that agency can only be collective; it is always and only the agency of a group (and theorists like Jane Bennett encourage, even enjoin, us to note the multiple objects that must be part of this group). There is no agency by an individual, so it's no wonder that the subject is a condition for agency. This is simply another way of pointing to the fact of collectivity. It would make more sense, then, to say that no individual can become subject, which, it seems to me, is the insight of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, as well as Lacan.

And of the problem of narration? If subject refers to a collective (mass, class, party), then any telling of its story will be partial. It's story will always be open and in process. But this is not because of a dispossession (which Butler considers because she presumes the link between individual and subject) but because of plurality. The subject's story of itself doesn't present a paradox because there isn't a whole or complete story to tell.

February 10, 2013

Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen reads the primary issues of 'Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego' as arising out of the problematic of the relation between self and other. On the one hand, this problematic is a trick: it presupposes the subject as a self, that is, as already constituted and separate from the other such that relation (in the strict Freudian sense) cannot arise; on the other, this very questioning preserves and protects the subject insofar as it posits it, is premised on it. Shouldn't we think, rather, of a primary sociality that precedes the ego as well as the other--"a mass-ego, a primordial crowd" (133)?

Freud has already implied as much when he observes, in the close of "On Narcissism," that the ego ideal has a social side: "the common ideal of a family, a class, or a nation." Yet we know that insofar as he continued to presuppose an ego, even one that could form itself, he displaced the problem of the group elsewhere (even as it continued to distort his analysis). He returns openly to it in "Group Psychology." Since Freud is heavily indebted to LeBon--quoting pages and pages of his The Crowd, B-J begins with LeBon.

B-J describes LeBon in terms that make clear the proximity between LeBon and Freud. First, both read symptoms as pathological returns to a previous state (so, origins are revealed in symptoms). Second, the crowd is the buried truth (symptom of the social/political): "beind 'people' there lurks the crowd and 'primitive communism' (135). Third, the crowd reveals the 'unconscious substratam' that all its members have in common (something like a racial unconscious, although I think this is better understood simply as belonging: the crowd displays our fundamental nature as belonging. This common basis enables Freud to appropriate LeBon (blurring their respective terminologies);

the crowd is impervious to contradiction, to logical argumentation; credulous, it knows neither doubt nor degrees of conviction; it cannot be restrained, for it tolerates no lapse between desire and its realization, to the point of being careless about its own preservation; the only reality it recognizes is psychic reality (image, illusion, the 'magic word) . . . It seems, then, that at the end of the enumeration the matter is settled: crowd psychology is nothing but the psychology of the unconscious ... The unconscious, in other words, is the archaic group, sociality or collectivity. (And the only question left is in what sense the unconscious is [the] collective. 137

So, it is collective in the sense of common to individuals (and so still within an individual psychology) or is communal or trans, exceding the boundaries of 'individual', or is it prior to this very boundness? And, if we are talking here about prior collectivity than in what sense can we say it: this only repeats for us the problem of the subject or ego; we presuppose a unity.

The crowd, though, is not a unity; it has no identity of its own. B-J notes that LeBon insists that a crowd 'is based not on a common ground but on the absence of any 'subjectal' ground.' Crowds are accumulations from different causes (even if this accumulation is underneath or prior to his odious 'racial soul'). They have, then, a set of new characteristics: sentiment of invincible power, mental contagion, suggestibility. We should note that these are strange characteristics, clearly of disanalogous types--a feeling, a process, an attribute. Also, B-J observes that the latter two disrupt any thing of the crowd as some kind of closed entity in that contagion could designate a process that flows through the crowd, that produces a crowd, or that comes into the crowd from without. Suggestibility is similar: it could designate internal as well as extrnal processes (suggestions from another source).

The crowd does not have an unconscious (an inherited, archaic unconscious), simply because it is not a subject or an aggregate of subjects. At the very most, the crowd may be said to be the unconscious "itself," the crowd-unconscious or the mass unconsious: neither substratumr nor substructure, but rather a soft, malleable, plastic, infinitely receptive material without will or desire or any specific instinct of its own. A matrical mass: the group as a womb. 139

I am going to look for ways to avoid this maternalization of the crowd, particularly as it evokes the idiocy of aborption in jouissance, an imaginary unity, etc. For even if LeBon (or even Freud) may admit of such a reading, later work on crowds (Rude, specifically) provide strong evidence of the rational will of crowds. Even LeBon and Freud, though, reject 'infinite receptivity,' in that they note that the crowd can resist, object, and insist. The crowd acts more like a subject that B-J wants to acknowledge. But, this is likely because his interest is less in the crowd than in the Freudian subject.

B-J's basic point regarding LeBon, then, is that LeBon's crowd is indistinguishable from the unconscious because the unconscious is for me "indissolubly nonsubjectal and 'social," members of the crowd are just "mediums" controlled by suggestion. The model here is hypnosis (totally trendy at the time). The primordial crowd lies at the origin of society and the individual. Every specific crowd is a reappearance. There's a problem in LeBon's account, though, because the crowd doesn't seem capable of giving rise to or originating anything. They depend on suggestibility, on something coming from outside them, which means, again, that they can't be an origin.

The reactionary LeBon takes another path, the way of the Leader. B-J quotes LeBon: "Men gathered in a crowd lose all force of will, and turn instinctively to the person who possesses the quality they lack." They have no will. What makes a leader the leader is the fact that he does (the feminity of the crowd and masculinity of the leader, the phallic logic at work here, is pretty crude). The leader gives form to the inchoate mass. B-J suggests that the form the leader provides it the political form as the Subject-form --and vice versa, establishing the complicity between the political form and the Subject-form: "There would be no body politic if there were not individual at the outset; and if this is so, it is because the body-politic is defined as a supra-indvidual" (145). The leader provides the crowd with its will.

What is Freud's response? He fully accepts the leader but rejects LeBon's account of suggestion. B-J summarizes Freud's critique of hypnosis: it is too violent and intrustive, too directive. Rather than allowing the unconscious to express itself by freeing it of its internal obstacles (as occurs in free association) hypnosis imprints it from without. But there's a problem: suggestibility didn't vanish from psychoanalysis. It's present under a different name: transference.

In an organicist explanation, Freud considers the nature of the tie holding members of the crowd together as Eros rendered as a combining or clustering tendency: society as a multicellular organism (Eros will ultimately be rendered as the love of each member for the leader). But doesn't this clash with the impulse underlying his critique of hypnosis? For B-J, the answer is yes. And this very tension indicates that we are dealing with the logic of the Subject.

For when Freud rises up against the tyrrany of suggestion, he is of course militating in favor of the autonomy of the individual subject. But when, like LeBon and many others, he conceives of society as an organism, he is likewise militating in favor of a collective subject or Subject-State . . . That body which is society requires a head; the organism requires a center of organization. And the group cannot set itself up as Subject except by setting up, and setting itself up as, the figure of an independent, autonomous subject taking its authority from iutself alone--hence of an authoritarian leader . . .The politics outlined here is a narcissistic politics. 157

B-J, tracing Freud's "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego," doesn't turn directly to the problem of this Subject, this narcissistic politics. Instead he deconstructs the opposition between binding and unbinding. Ties among group members--narcissists all--are libidinal and nonlibidinal, possible and impossible, detached and attached all at once.

He also returns to identification, pulling out tensions in Freud's discussion of identification in the text. A first issue concerns the anteriority of identification to the ego--but how is identification without a model possible (part of the problem in the essay on narcissism). "The difficulty involving the formation of the ego or the birth of the subject" is "impossible to resolve within the conceptual framework of psychoanalysis." It's impossible to say which comes first--identification or object bond.

A way out: a prehistory in which the two are not yet separate, where hate-identification and object love are one and the same, "devouring identification as process of ego-formation:" "but we are not win a prehistory of the ego, in a sociality or a collectivity that precedes all individual history" 180. B-J traces this out to argue for a kind of maternal-womb, identificatory devouring. He then introduces two other kinds of identification in the text. The purpose is to show a range of options open to Freud, who himself always chooses the "Oedipal" option, which means he bypasses certain problems (particularly of origination) and undertakes various conflations and elisions. To what end? According to B-J, to preserve the Subject and Politics, 191.

The preemptory installation of Oedipus complex at the origin of the history of the individual subject is a way of short-circuiting the investigation of the subject's genesis in a pre-individual identification with the other. In this sense, it is no exaggeration to say that the Oedipal hypothesis intervenes to protect the autarchy of the subject--or, in what amounts to the same thing, the propriety of its desire (its 'feelings,' its affects, and so on)--in order to protect it against the possibility of an altration (which particularly does not mean an alienation) constitutive of its identity, its most proper 'being.' 192

The result: the subject's exemption from the question of its being (like) the other, of its being-social. As B-J points out, the wild and unexpected move in the chapter on identification is the way that social psychology appears at the heart of individual psychology. "The group is thus at the origin (without origin) of the individual." Freud, though, conceals this in the Oedipus complex. B-J's argument is thus that the Oedipus complex is a political myth of an individual subject not permeated by violence 'of a relation without relation to the other,' but instead lovingly closed in on itself.

To be sure, the Oedipal complex itself denotes a crisis "and a violent one at that." Again, B-J notes the opposition and oscillation between identification and object choice: when violence is eliminated on one side, it shifts to the other. How can hate give way to love? How does love become hate? How does rivalrous identification become sympathetic identification?

Freud takes this up in chapter 9 of "Group Psychology." The chapter rejects the herd instinct proposed by Trotter. Sociality is not natural--hostility and jealousy are. Identification, in the sense of sympathy, is necessary to put an end to rivalry. Here again, the problem: before, identification was the source of jealousy, "feeling like the other, in the place of the other, from the place of the other" 200. Now it turns into its opposite, giving rise to love, justice, a social conscience, a sense of duty. "Identification is thus both the locus of the problem and the site of its resolution" 202.

At this point, B-J turns to the leader, the relationship to which constitutes the founding bond of society. It won't be surprising to learn that Freud's account stumbles because the leader can't be understood via identification or libidinal ties (even though Freud tries to employ the Oedipal frame). Hence, Freud reintroduces narcissism to try to account for followers love for themselves in the leader. B-J asks whether, if the founding bond of the social is narcissistic, it makes sense to distinguish between narcissistic mental acts and social mental acts (as Freud does in the essay on narcissism. This suggests to me the instability of the individual, its blurring into the social. Rather than narcissism at the root of the social, the social is at the root of narcissism. Narcissism is a desperate failure at an impossible individuation.

If the leader is loved (and Freud discusses being in love in this context) this means that the ego is impoverished to the benefit of the object, which absorbs it. If the leader is identified with, this means that the object is introjected into the ego, which absorbs it. So, which is it? Freud's attempt to distinguish them in effect undermine the difference between them. One of the reasons this matters is that there has to be a difference between the bond between members and the bond between a member and the leader (without a difference, the leader is not a leader).

Freud defines the group as "a number of individuals who have put one and the same object in the place of their ego ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego" 212. For B-J, the problem is that Freud doesn't explain the sort of bond with object put in place. Thus, B-J constructs the following possibility. "Putting the object in the place of the ego ideal means putting it in that identificatory place where the ego would like to be, but where it cannot or must not be itself". The kind of identification at work is one that is incomplete in that the other remains other; the other is inassimilable ("inimitable and uneatable"); imitation of the inimitable. The example here is the Church, where the faithful are to be like Christ (the ideal) even as they are really to put themselves in Christ's place (which would be crazy).

B-J says that the same logic is at work "The Ego and the Id" (written three years after Group Psych). The point at stake involves identification in the Oedipal complex: if the boy child identifies with his father, that would maintain his rivalry with him. How, then, can the boy child have a love bond with his father that ends the rivalry? How can the child be like but not be like his father? There is, B-J, says "an antimimetic interdiction" that forms the heart of morality:

not to identify with the other (more precisely, not to identify the other with oneself) is the only way of respecting the other as other, without doing him violence. The Law is the of the Other. It is thus, by the same token, a Law of the Subject. "Do not be like me": this is understood, positively, prescriptively, as "Be yourself," "Be original," "Be a subject." The origin of morality is simultaneously the origin of the subject, in the sense that there is no subject (identifying itself as ego through difference from the other) except a moral subject, morally instituted. The Law assigns the subject, assigns it to being. Thus would emerge from the Oedipal chaos, where all is in all and the ego in the other, a subject finally identified, identifiable, capable of entering into normal, normed, regulated relations with others/ That, at least, is what could be said if this very "subject" did not have to identify itself in order to be a subject. 217

The law can't take the form of an interdiction because there isn't yet a subject. "The law, the double law that assigns the subject, is thus stated as follows: 'Identify without identifying.' Or, more simply still: 'Identify yourself as a subject.' (I am reminded b0th of Nietzsche in the Genealogy of Morals and Hegel in the Philosophy of Right: be a person and respect others as persons. Why would there need to be an injunction to be a person?)

For B-J the issue is that of the insane core of Oedipal law, the double bind instituting the subject at the site where it submits to a law by transgressing it (and this is why the subject is always guilty). The Oedipal law "binds twice over: it bonds and unbonds the subject" 218.

B-J's writing at this point is wondrously, deliriously over-the-top, fullying enjoying the paradox of guilt, destruction, guilt, punishment, birth, and identification. Identifying in order not to identify, a veritable Escher-esque Oedipal complex where the exit is no different from the entrance. And yet I wonder if his enjoyment here may also be a kind of relief from the problem of Group Psychology --after all, he is discussing "The Ego and the Id." So the ego has a kind of separate obviousness that it lacks in Group Psychology. When he returns to Group Psychology, he does so rather flatly and simply, saying that the Father-Leader represents the ideal of crowd members, a point so obvious in the text that all the paradoxical delirium seems unnecessary, a distraction.

At this point, the chapter is almost over. Yet it feels strange and unsatisfying, moving quickly to hypnosis and then back to LeBon. The strangeness, to me, results from the disconnect between the Oedipal discussion and the return to 'the collective prehistory of humanity.' What's at stake here is the collective unconscious or the 'unconscious-as-collective' (235). "The first psychology of humanity (ours, even now) was collective" and "this 'psychology,' this thought, belonged to no subject. Being common to all (communing them), it belonged to no one."

And then: the story of the primal horde and Father-leader, killed by the sons yet narrated by the poet/genius who puts himself in the role of the Father-subject-creative genius. Who to be unique must imitate. For B-J, this is the story of Freud's egoistic dream, and ours as well. For me, it's a story of psychoanalysis as the failure of individuation, the impossibility of the individual.

Why does he not ask whether the crowd, group, collective is Subject? Here Subject would be multiple, heterogeneous, conflictual, and incomplete even as active, creative, and willful. Hypnotist-Leader-Father would be contingent, tempting, and dangerous. Guilt is falling for the lure, pretending to the image of a separateness that is not separate. Do not identify, do not be like me means do not separate, do not put the image (ego) where we are and have been.

January 31, 2013

A key line of argumentation in The Freudian Subject attempts to de-sexualize psychoanalytic theory. I appropriate the idea as follows: Freud treats the unconscious as the unconscious of a subject. This leads him to individualize it, to contain it within the individual, as we might say, an ego unconscious. But much of what he discovers can't be contained within the individual. It points to an unconscious that cannot be trapped in a scene or point, an unconscious that moves and shifts. Why is the unconscious this way? I want to argue that it's because the unconscious is a crowd; it's plural, multiple (and so the question remains: is it a still the unconscious of a subject, now understood as a collective subject? or, is it collective but not a subject?) . Freud tries various ways to repress his knowledge of this crowd. One way is with his emphasis on sexuality, which also immediately ties the subject back to others, although in a more singular way, that is, a way delimited by Oedipus. Sex is too limiting (or, in the famous line from Sid and Nancy: sex is boring).

How does Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen develop his argument? In the second section, he reads Freud's discussion of narcissism together with Freud's correspondence (Jung, Fleiss). A key issue: Freud's emphasis on sexuality, particularly in the eliding of the autoerotic body with narcissism that occurs in the correspondence with Jung. This elision is a problem. The autoerotic body is anarchic, ruptured, conflicting (70); this body doesn't merge easily into a narcissism that associates a whole, unified body with an individual, which makes the body into my own body. There is uneasiness and confusion here.

B-J argues that Freud insists on sexuality as a way to give body to narcissism. And, also, as a way to differentiate his view from Jung's even as it had blended and overlapped in a "communism of thought-sharing" in their correspondence. The emphasis on sexuality was, according to B-J, also a (re)institutionalization of "intellectual private property." The explanation of narcissism was a product of a narcissism caught up in mimetic rivalry.

B-J makes a similar argument as he reads Freud's "Psycho-Analytic Notes" together with the Freud-Jung correspondence on the topic of paranoia and homosexuality. For B-J, the issues at stake are much more those of rivalry than sexuality; Freud, however, emphasizes sexuality in the context of his own rivalrous identification with Jung. B-J's argumentation considers the "archesociality" of homosexuality in Freud's account, as well as the tension this causes for Freud's discussion of homosexuality as a threat to sociality. The discussion is intricate. For now, I want to jump to one of the conclusions:

So let us not dream, with Freud, of an ego whose existence would recede sociality (or--and it is the same thing--a sociality that would relate already-constituted subjects to each other. This would be to theorize with delusion, to speculate in line with desire. For narcissism is precisely that: the violent affirmation of the ego, the violent desire to annul that primitive alteration that makes me desire (myself) as the mimetic double . . .desire is mimetic and by the same token narcissistic, and that means that it launches headlong into a systematic, unreflective forgetfulness of what institutes it.

It follow that desire is love of oneself, as Freud writes: self-love, love of the proper. It follows too that it is organized as a vehement rejection of all resemblances, all mimesis. To recognize that I resemble the other, that I resemble myself in him even in my own desire, would be tantamount to admitting the inadmissible: that I am not myself and that my most proper being is over there, in that double who enrages me.

It follows, finally, that narcissicism is violence, and that the ego ...is a gloomy tyrant . . . Narcissism is in profound collusion with power--by which we mean tyrannical power, or put another way, political madness--by virtue of its mimetic, rivalrous, (a)social origin . . . 93-94

Affirmation of the ego is violent because it is a wrenching of the ego out of the crowd, the collective, the group of which it is a part. Or, the ego is nothing else but this wrenching, this assertion of self. And it's an assertion doomed to frustration because it depends on the very others it needs to annihilate. The horror of the ego: I am not myself.

B-J says that the violence of the ego is also present at the collective level: "the totalitarianism and imperialism of the 'we' are never anything but the supreme phase of the absolution of the ego, the "I," and they are implied in even the most solitary, most pacific meditations on the ego cogtito."

This does not mean that any collective is totalitarian, only that it risks totalitarianism insofar as they are 'the supreme phase' of the absolution of the ego. But, even in this somewhat watered down version, I wonder if B-J jumps to quickly to make the 'we' nothing but the ego bigger. That, I think, is too fast, particularly given his focus already on the dilemmas of sociality.

I've been reading this in order to get at the primacy of collectivity and a sense of collective desire. At this point, I am afraid that one of the costs of this direction is that the desire at work is violent. The violence, though, I think is the violence of the assertion of the ego. It's a product of mimesis, the operation that let's desire be as the desire of a subject even as it undermines the subject itself; or, desire insofar as creates and threatens an ego.

Fortunately, I think, the chapter ends in a way I need it to: primary narcissism is a myth, present only as already crossed out (101). Or, in my language, it's a symptom of the problems Freud is having enclosing the unconscious or accounting for the emergence of a subject as an ego.

That the subject emerges in and through a primordial fiction is what Freud has been saying from the outset, from the moment he declared ... that 'something' has to form the ego. This has to mean that the ego is nothing--not even amorphous matter, not even a 'fragmented body'--prior to such a formation, prior to such a 'creation.' Thus we have no business speculating about the nature of the ego, the subject, the Narcissus complex, any more than we may presuppose any sort of property or subjective identity. Such identity will always be apocryphal and fictious (but its falseness can no longer be truthfully expressed), inasmuch as there can be no subject except one that is initially modeled on or modeled by (here we have no way of distinguishing activity from passivity, spontaneity from receptivity) something that 'precedes' it. 116

In the beginning were others. We weren't among the others; I wasn't one among them. I emerge from and out of them and the I that emerges will always be to an extent false, fictious, imaginary (B-J, though rejects Lacan's account of the imaginary because 'in the beginning there is no one to see anything at all;' this doesn't seem to me to be necessary because I think they are talking about different stages).

And can we apply this to thinking about a political subject? Perhaps when we note the blurring of active and passive, spontaneous and receptive.

Back to B-J: his point is that Freud's early arguments presuppose the ego and the arguments in the narcissism essay attempt to solve this problem but fail (resulting in an essay that is unreadable). His very language breaks down.

if the ego is not 'present from the outset,' if it is nothing prior to accepting in (and as) 'itself' a form that comes 'from without,' it follows not only that the relation to the object (to the other, to the 'non-ego') is primary, but also and especially that this first relation cannot have been a specular relation, nor even, ultimately, a relation at all.

The ego can't emerge by looking because that assumes that there is something that is looking; it can't emerge via an object relation, because that assumes a separate ego that can be in this relation.

Where the ego forms itself in the image of the other, where it mimes the other, one can no longer speak either of 'form' or 'image,' either of 'self' or 'other.' Where the id was (neither himself nor myself), the 'I" arrives. And the id can no longer be expressed in the language of the visible, of perception, of phenomenality, nor, by the same token, in any sort of theory of models and images. The other stage becomes a beyond-stage, a fore-stage of the primary mimesis. 118

Freud's attempts to explain the ego ideal and ideal ego, whether via introjection and internalization or projection flounder on the same problem: positing an ego before the one the origins of which he is trying to describe. Freud only 'solves' the problem by shifting it to another level.

How are we to explain that an ego (fragment) assimilates (itself) (to) the other and thereby forms itself? That it begins by incarnating (itself) (as) voice, law, ideal? That it emerges by incorporating (itself) (as) voice, law, ideal? That t emerges by incorporating (itself) (as) the other, the object? These are inevitable, and inevitably hopeless, questions, as long as continue to posit a preformed, ready-made ego. For it is not clear why such an ego would need to identify itself, even "partially," with an ideal imposed from without, or why it would desire to submit to the law that imposed imitation. If the subject is "at the beginning," why would it subject itself? 124

As B-J explains, this the problematic of the second topography Freud introduces in the 1920s:

How can we conceive of that strange figure of an ego that forms its ideal in its own image and forms itself in the image of its ideal, that projects itself in the ideal and introjects the ideal, that identifies the ideal with itself and itself with the ideal? 125

I think the answer has to turn on the crowd. And, the final chapter of the book thus focuses on the primal band.

January 30, 2013

As part of my ongoing inquiry into collective desire, I've been reading Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject. It has not gotten the attention it deserves. Borch-Jacobsen, in a work informed by Lacan and Girard, asks about the "it" that thinks, exceeding consciousness (self-presence), language, signifier, and structure. Who thinks in the unconscious? Who is the subject of desire? Who is the subject of the unconscious, this intimate otherness?

B-J's bold claim: the unconscious is multiple, unnameable, unverifiable. It is unidentifiable because it is plural. The book is a close reading of Freud. My comments try to give a schematic of the argument; they don't repeat B-J's own close engagements with the texts.

Desire

B-J does not accept the Lacanian idea that desire depends on lack, that it is necessarily unsatisfied. Rather, he thinks that desire is satisfied through identification (even as identification is not the object of desire). Indentification sets up a scenario "in which the wish is presented as fulfilled: on this basis, identification is indeed the satisfaction of the desire as such" (16-17). He writes:

saying that wishes are fulfilled fantasmatically and that enjoyment is based on identification amounts to saying the same thing. This is what accounts for the fact that the subject's place in fantasy is always the place of another.

Or in Lacanese, desire is the desire of the Other (a point to which B-J returns more than once). Even with respect to the lack, B-J seems to me to be more compatible with Lacan than he acknowledges. Why? Because B-J's discussion is about fantasy, enjoying in fantasy, using fantasy to stage desire. Enjoyment is indirect. It has to take a detour (and now we get into the weird fuzziness of the it that enjoys or enjoyment as its own force or, possibly, something else, something more primordial). Identification is that detour (and, as Zizek will remind us, there are at least two possibilities here, with an ideal ego or an ego ideal). And wish fufillment is always in another place.

Enjoyment is fantasmatic (the wish is fufilled in a fantasy). The fantasy stages desire. But whose? It is only present to the subject insofar as the subject identifies with another; it is never directly manifest as the subject's desire but as the desire of another. But why?

B-J answers this by connecting desire first with mimesis (not with interdiction or the Law ala Lacan; this seems to me like a good move, especially for us now in a setting of the decline of symbolic efficiency). Invoking Girard, he claims that desire had no object before a mediator intervenes to tell us what is desireable (this is also compatible with Zizek, whether with respect to his discussion of the ego ideal, his discussion of the theft of enjoyment, or his discussion of ideology as a matrix of desire; in each instance, desire depends on the other; desire is the desire of the other). Desire for an object, then, is induced. It is secondary to imitation, mimesis, that is, to the desire of others. For B-J, this means that there is a prior desire to imitate. And, since mimesis informs desire, desire is indissolubly bound to rivalry, hatred, and violence: I want what the other has; I want it in his place. "What triggers desires is mimetic assmilation, identification with a model of desire" 28.

The repercussion of this is that the aim of desire is to be, not to have. And, to be, for B-J, means to be like. Identification is what enables the desire to be. B-J notes that not only does this mimetic account of desire displace the centrality of sexuality (and the centrality of the object), but that it priotizes a different set of passions, the passions connected with being replaced and being equated: rivalry, jealousy, envy, ambition. Note the fundamental ambivalence involved in identification with another (32). So, for B-J desire is not first about obtaining pleasure (object oriented), it is first about identification. No wonder desire may involve pain and death.

That desire is mimetic raises particular questions with respect to fantasy: in what way does fantasy stage desire? If the scene stages desire, the subject is in the position of the spectator. If the scene is one in which the subject acts out desire, then the subject is an actor within the scene.

Thus the subject either plays a part in the spectacle or is a spectator; either he merely sees or he sees himself, by presenting himself to himself, confronting himself, in the objectivity of the Vor-stellung; either he is in representation, here and now, in the scene on stage, or he is representing himself there, on the stage. This dilemma is implacable, insurmountable. The lack of distinction between self and other--the mimesis--has to be acted out; yet no sooner is it represented to the subject in the specular mode than it is betrayed. At that very moment the image in the mirror, the spectacle will have already opened up the space of adversity (note that I am not saying of alterity): hence the instanteous rage that overcomes the child when she sees the other in her place ... And no doubt the other will be at that moment scarcely different from me mylsef (almost myself); but this self, myself, being specular, will already be an adverse, adversary self, an enemy (almost another). 40.

A difference, a cleavage, between the stage on which one is playing and the stage one sees. One cannot occupy both positions at the same time (although we can list efforts to do so: plays within plays; Being John Malkovich). Thus, "mimesis is unrepresentable for the subject in the mode of Vorstellung. Remaining unspecularized, it remains ungraspable. It is in this sense that fatnasy remains unconscious--not that it is assigned to a place or subject, but that it cannot be assigned. Or, as I will add, that it remains plural.

I wonder if the analysis of mimesis here provides a way for thinking about opposition to the party: it's like at the moment when our political energies and efforts are assigned to an agency compromised of us even as it stands outside of us, people become anxious, angry, concerned. The other (that is us) is in our place. We can't occupy both the position of spectators and of actors at the same time. This also makes me wonder about a lot of anger I recently heard expressed toward 'so many cameras' in Occupy. The cameras were seen as in the way, non active, merely spectators, even as they were right in the middle of the scene, part of the crowd.

Desire does not come first. (47). There is no desiring subject prior to identification. "Identification brings the desiring subject into being." There is 'primordial tendency' to identification; it gives rise to desire, and this desire is "from the outset, a (mimetic, rivalrous) desire to oust the incommodious other from the place the pseudo-subject already occupies in fantasy."

It's not yet clear to me why, exactly, there is a primoridal tendency to identification. B-J is emphatic that it's not a matter of a primary repression (to think in this direction is to presume a pre-existing subject--which also makes me think of Butler's discussion of passionate attachments). He also wants to avoid 'the ineradicable megalomania of desire.

The so-called subject of desire has no identity of its own prior to the identification that brings it, blindly, to occupy the point of otherness, the place of the other (who is thus not an other): an original alienation (which is thus not an alienation); and an original lure (which is thus not a lure, either).

Does this tell us why there is a tendency to identification? My idea is that this tendency is the problem of individuation and embodiment. That it designates the problem of self-consciousness as something apart from being originally a part, from being a part of a collective or a crowd or a group. And that insofar as we are originally parts, we remain inextricably interconnected--every attempt to be apart involve connection at another point. Hence, original alienation is not alienation at all, but the immediacy of connection (which should not be mistaken for absorption).

January 19, 2013

In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud concerns himself with man as a member, man in his belonging to: how is that that to which man belongs, belongs to him?

We should note that the German title refers to Massenpsychologie. The English "group" could have been translated as mass or as crowd. I consider the book in some detail for several reasons: first, because of the way the group is enclosed in the individual; second, because of the link between transference and the group; third, because many of the elements of Freud's account reappear in later writers' discussions of crowds. What is crucial in this text is the primacy of the group to the individual. Group psychology--belonging, connection, will--comes first. The individual ego develops out of it in a process that is unstable and incomplete.

Group psychology, Freud tells us, is concerned with the simultaneous influence of a large number of people, generally strangers, on the individual. It thus concerns man as a member of a race, nation, caste, profession, institution, or crowd organized at a particular time for a specific purpose. What's interesting to Freud is that man's insertion into a group leads to thoughts, feelings, and actions that are unexpected. He wants to understand the nature of the mental change effected by groups.

I have italicized insertion into a group because in some ways Freud's account actually seems to be inverted, an account of the group's insertion into the man or, differently put, the enclosure of the group in the individual. Perhaps it makes sense to say that there is an ambiguity here as to what is incorporating what: does the group incorporate the man or does the man incorporate, internalize, introject the group? Is it possible that there is a reciprocal, albeit uneven and not without remainder, incorporating? And might this unsteady, unstable site of overlap be the space of the subject such that subject is necessarily collective?

Freud develops his account by quoting extensively from Gustave LeBon's The Crowd. There are two significant elements in the first passage from LeBon that he lifts: the fact that individuals in a group are in the possession of a kind of 'collective mind that makes feel, think, and act in manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think, and act were he in a state of isolation' and the idea that the psychological group is a 'provisional being formed of heterogeneous elements.' Neither of these points interests Freud. He basically assumes that LeBon's ideas are in keeping with his. What he wants to know is what it is that unites individuals into a group, but LeBon isn't telling.

Instead, LeBon is talking about things like a racial unconscious, an 'unconscious substratum created in the mind in the main by hereditary influences.' This substratum is similar in everyone. Individual characteristics are a kind of superstructure of difference built on this common base. This suggests that the base is common, that it consists in the group. The group is again incorporated in the individual. As I see it, the problem with this sort of claim, one manifest in its racism, is an assumption of substantial content. It is insufficiently formal. So a similarity is implied and inserted into what is formally the press and presence of many, of the crowd. Similarity is assumed when all that can be assumed is commonality.

One might expect the argument to be that this unconscious is what manifests itself in the crowd. Somewhat surprisingly--at least Freud is surprised--LeBon's argument is instead that new characteristics, characteristics not previously possessed, are displayed. The first is a sense of invincibility that accompanies a loss of a sense of responsibility. Freud writes this off as not surprising--of course our deepest selves lack responsibility; the crowd enables the individual to 'throw off repressions.' Note, insofar as the repressions that mark the individual are thrown off, it's the crowd that returns. More interesting is the second: contagion. It is kin to hypnosis. The third is suggestibility. I should add that nearly everyone who writes about crowds describes crowds in terms of contagion and suggestibility. We see the language of contagion, for instance, in discussions of the movements of 2011 as well as in networked media.

Freud's next two pages consist almost entirely of long passages from LeBon on contagion and hypnosis. He notes that there is an assymetry in LeBon's account. Contagion refers to members effects on each other. Suggestibility, particularly when understood in terms of hypnosis, suggests something else entirely. Who is the hypnotist?

Before investigating this problem, Freud includes another long quote from LeBon:

Moreover, by the mere fact that he forms part of an organised group, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilisation. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian -- that is, a creature acting by instinct. He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings.

Freud approves, finding this helpful for understanding the individual in the group. Again, he seems to me to invert his point since the passage seems to describe the primitive group within the individual, sedimented as the hereditary components of the unconscious.

Freud next turns to the group per se and repeats various elements of LeBon's description, saying that the group is changeable, irritable, impulsive, credulous, incapable of perseverence, desirous, intolerant of delays in the satisfaction of its desire, open to influence, and that it thinks in images. The group is inclined to extremes, obedient to authority, respectful of force, it goes to extremes. It has a thirst for obedience: it is an 'obedient herd.' "It wants to be ruled by force and to fear its masters." At the same time, because it is not ruled by personal interests groups may be devoted to ideals. In short, in groups extremes exist side by side.

Finally, Freud notes that LeBon's discussion of leaders is rather minimal. What he likes in it, though, is LeBon's account of a mysterious power, 'prestige,' as a kind of domination exerted by an individual or idea that paralyzes our critical faculty and fills us with astonishment and respect. Prestige, Freud says, arouses a feeling like that of fascination in hypnosis.

Freud is preoccupied with the leader because he wants to know what it is that ties the group together--the main thing he thinks is missing from LeBon's discussion. His hypothesis is that the answer is love, or emotional relationships. Love holds the group together. The individual gives up his distinctiveness to the group because he wants to be in harmony with its members.

Before I continue we should keep in mind a few things at this point. First, we are talking about groups that range from race, to caste, to nation, to profession, to institution, to crowd. Second, these groups are all considered to be psychological groups. Whether an individual is physically in the group--in the crowd or in an institution--is no different from whether the individual is imagining or feeling himself to be in it--as with the nation or race. There is no difference between whether the individual is in the group or the group is within the individual. Third, the description of the group's behavior comes primarily from LeBon, who takes his description from Taine's account of the French revolution, that is, from descriptions of revolutionary masses.

It would be too easy simply to reject Freud at this point. Better, I think, is to try to get at what's compelling so far. Why, in other words, it might not be completely wrong to compare a professional organization, with one's membership in the imaginary community of the nation, with the experience of being in a crowd. When one thinks of oneself as a member of any group, one is occupying the position of that group towards a specific issue or question. One isn't thinking from one's own personal interests, but from a collective interest. Personal interest is subsumed in the collective. [Incidentally, the problem of the US--which might be the same as the problem of liberal democracy as well as any form of libertarianism--is that the collective is subsumed by the individual; the individual is prioritized.] This is a rather cognitivist illustration. What about something more affective? Here as an example we might think of nationalist responses to the burning of a state flag or perhaps to the invocation of threats. Or, with regard to professional organizations we might think of the way we apply certain standards of 'professional excellence' when we assess matters that we might approach differently under other circumstance ("well, I like X's work, but X is not right for this job").

Are we far removed from suggestibility and contagion? Not if we recall the mysterious 'prestige.' In professional situations we often respond to the fact of another's prestige--which is one of the reasons for double blind peer review. We also often find ourselves rather automatically repeating terms, phrases, ideas that have been suggested to us. I wonder if our often overstated critiques of others' work are reactive attempts to shake ourselves loose from these kinds of attachments. There could be, then, habits of mind that are not fully our own, that inhabit us in ways rather too much like the enthusiasm of the crowd at a football match.

So Freud has accepted LeBon but wants to look further at what it is that ties together members of a group. He has suggested that the ties are emotional--love. To explore this further he turns to the church and the army. What is the intervening step? He says that what is really worthy of attention is the distinction between leaderless groups and groups with leaders. And, 'in complete opposition to the usual practice,' he will begin not with simple groups but with highly organized, lasting, artificial groups, again, church an army -- two groups, incidentally, not mentioned in his summary of LeBon.

According to Freud, church and army are groups that people don't typically choose to enter and that they leave only at high personal costs such as punishment or persecution. Each are headed by an individual (Christ, commander) "who loves all the individuals in the group with an equal love." This illusion of equal love is absolutely essential, Freud tells us. Everything depends on it. Christ stands in relation to the individuals in the church as a kind of elder brother or 'father surrogate.' In fact, because of the equality of members (each shares equally in Christ's love), the church is like a family. Members call each other brothers (and sisters). 'The tie which unites each individual to Christ is also the cause of the tie which unites them with one another." The army is basically the same, with the fundamental difference being that this familial structure is repeated in a hierarchical fashion (sections, units, squadrons, etc). What matters here to Freud is the double nature of the libidinal tie of the group: individual to leader, individual to individual.

The tie to the group is libidinal, strong enough to limit one's narcissism. So, what kind of libidinal tie is it? Answering this question takes Freud to a discussion of the differences between identification and object choice. "Identification is known to psychoanalysis as the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person." Additionally, from the very first identification is ambivalent; tenderness can become hostility. Freud's example (a nice convergence of identification and incorporation) is the cannibal who only devours those of whom he is fond.

The repercussion of the discussion of identification for Freud's account of the church and the army is that he oedipalize them, that is, present the group as ultimately no different from the family.

The discussion of identification is detailed, detailed in a way that Freud notes has left the riddle of group ties untouched, shifting it over to the riddle of hypnosis. He got to hypnosis via 'being in love.' He explains that hypnosis is not actually a good object to compare with group formation because it is 'identical with it,' isolating 'the behavior of the individual to the leader.' In a group, the individuals have all substituted the same object for their ego ideal and 'have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego.' (Because Freud is interested in the leader, he addresses the ego ideal and its relation to the ego in some detail; I might have to take this up in a subsequent post. For now, I am leaving it to the side because I am more interested in the group, not in the somersaults Freud does to try to discuss groups in terms of a leader.)

Freud wonders whether it would have been simpler just to talk about a herd instinct (he invokes Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in War and Peace, 1916). But, he says no. What's really at work is the more complex structure he already outlined, the one where multiple individuals identify with one another in their love for the same object (his example is that of 'the troop of women and girls ... who crowd around a singer or pianist after his performance'). Trotter's problem, and the reason the herd instinct doesn't explain groups, is that it leaves out the leader. There isn't a herd instinct. There's a horde instinct. Man is a horde animal, an individual creature in a horde led by a chief.

And so, the primal horde, the originary form that the group revives. Recall the basic characteristics of the group: the dwindling of conscious, individual personality, the predominance of the emotions and the unconscious metal life, the focus of feelings in a common direction, the tendency to immediacy--"all this corresponds to a set of regression to a primitive mental activity." His note regarding the primal horde is even more telling: "The will of the individual was too weak; he did not venture upon action. No impulses whatever came into play except collective ones; there was only a common will, there were no single ones." He concludes that the oldest psychology is the group psychology; individual psychology has only come into prominence from it gradually and in a way that is still incomplete.

Then Freud forces himself to make a distinction and make individual and group psychology co-equally primary. Why? Because of the leader. Yet this reintroduces the problem of individual psychology at another level: how does one who is a member of a group become a leader or how is that after the leader dies there is another who can take his place: "there must therefore be a possibility of transforming group psychology into individual psychology." Freud's answer is nearly nonsensical--he explains how the primal father forced his individual sons into group psychology (denial of sexual access to women; restriction of libidinal ties redirects them toward group). That is, he inverts what he said he was going to explain.

At any rate, Freud argues that the leader of the group is the same as the primal father, which is why the group wants to be dominated or led, why--and he quotes Le Bon here--the group has a thirst for obedience.

The mental differentiation part of the psychic development of the individual involves a separating from the group, but this separating is also an internalization (formation of ego ideal out of which the ego separates). The process is none to stable and liable to shock. Freud notes that it is conceivable that this separation can't be born for long and has to be temporarily undone (festivals). (To be clear, the primary direction of Freud's discussion involves the separation between the ego and ego ideal; I am trying to read it as the separation of the individual from the group. I think that this is fair insofar as the ego ideal is a figure of the group.)

In his closing remarks, Freud returns to the myth of the primal horde: father feared and loved, killed by band of sons, sons fight among themselves for power, gynocracy installed during this period, "some individual is moved to take over the father's part and free himself from the group" -- he was the first epic poet who invents the heroic myth, the myth of the hero who slays the father. The hero claims to act alone -- but folklore reminds us that he is always accompanied by a crowd, like small animals, bees, and ants.

"The myth, then, is the step by which the individual emerges from group psychology."

He also schematizes being in love, hypnosis, and the group. In the latter two, sexual tendencies are inhibited in their aims; the object is substituted for the ego ideal, with the extra element of identification with others in the case of the group.